Pickles

The other day as I was wandering through the garden pulling weeds and trimming the leaves on the sunflowers, I lifted a few leaves on the cucumber plants and noticed that some were almost big enough to pick! I waited until today to pick them so they had a chance to get a little bigger.
Of course my helper had to test out the freshly picked cucumbers...
We cut the little ones in half and quartered the bigger cucumbers and put them in jars along with a few slices of onion, some fresh garlic and fresh dill.
I then prepared a brine of vinegar, water, salt, sugar, whole peppercorns, mustard seeds and dried red pepper flakes. I heated it on the stove just to a simmer then poured it on top of the cukes in the jar.
These are refrigerator pickles, no need to process in a hot water canner, just put them right into the fridge. They take a few days to soak up the brine and flavor from all of the goodies I threw in the jar, but will last a few months if kept refrigerated, although I'm sure they will be gone long before I have to worry about them going bad.

I can't wait to try these over the holiday weekend!